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You may have missed this story, but here in the US, Democrats 'took to the Senate floor Monday night to talk about global warming and planned not to let up until morning. By midnight, lawmakers had been talking for nearly six hours'. We suggest that you read one of the stories about this talk-a-thon here. (This story was published on March 11 by NPR).
We're not political. We're project managers. We're focused on sustainability - but that doesn't put us anywhere in particular on the political spectrum. We are advocates for learning and action in this area, and we believe that project managers are change agents, and some of the people in the world with the most power to DO something about making their projects, their programs, and their portfolios more sustainable. And yes, that does involve the earth, but as our blog title says (look up there right now, folks, look at what it says!) we are looking at and acting on sustaining the social aspects of projects (People issues), ecological connections to projects (Planet issues), and financial longevity of organizations (Profit issues).
Still, it's frustrating to see an important body like the US Senate spend so much time talking and failing to act. To quote the referenced article, "Democratic leaders have no plans to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor this year, so the speeches were about little more than theatrics. House Democrats pushed through a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming in 2009, then lost their majority the following election. A climate bill led by then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry collapsed in 2010 without a vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
So the Democrats have failed to act. And many of the Republicans have failed to understand. From the article:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the talkathon amounted to "30 hours of excuses" from senators who think it's OK that "families are losing work because of government attacks on the coal industry."
"Well it's not OK, it's cruel," McConnell said, speaking on the Senate floor before the talkathon began. "It's cruel to tell struggling coal families that they can't have a job because some billionaire from San Francisco disagrees with their line of work."
And so it goes.
But here's the secret, and the good news. Although we recognize that it would make sense to have some sweeping changes in laws, there are things we can do as project managers to integrate sustaianbiltiy thinking in our projects. One of the biggest is simply to make the connection from the mission/vision/value statements of your organization to your project's charters. In an informal poll of 50 project managers in our classes, we found that only 5-8 of them even knew what the mission/vision statements were, and only 2 had seen the commitments made by their leaders to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objectives. We project managers - who are so focused on action, milestones, and deliverables - we are not prone to staying in a chamber and talking (while doing nothing) or boycotting that session altogether because we don't even have the sense to recognize the problem (that's our view of Democrats and Republicans, respectively, right now).
So - take some action RIGHT NOW. Go to your company/organization's home page. Click on the "About Us" section (or whatever it is called) and look for your leadership's statements on CSR. You may be very surprised. And you may be very empowered. But either way, you will be able to take action which is tied to your leaders' ideas.
And that's more than the US Senate can say. Or rather, it's more meaningful than anything they can say.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: March 16, 2014 09:04 PM |
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